click picture for AYCARDUS website

click picture for AYCARDUS website
Meister Eckhart

Friday, October 29, 2010

Status report (of sorts). . .

In October I participated in the XXIII Eckhart Conference held at All Saints Pastoral Centre in London Colney, UK.  The papers were excellent and on a variety of topics from neuroscience to the Our Father, from Nothingness to Chinese philosophy.  My role was a bit of an experiment.  I was the 'Spiritual Narrator' and my task was to offer comment and observations on the spiritual aspects for the group.  I must say it was well received and I was particularly glad that the presenters all found it enhanced their papers.
  Our translations are making progress and I will confess that the summer months were difficult to focus on them. Three are moving along nicely and my hope is that you will begin to see the fruits of this labor beginning in November.  Chief among these will be an excellent article by Rupert Mayer, OP which examines the influences of Aquinas and Dietrich von Freiburg in Eckhart on the question of esse.  I have also gotten word that the first of his sermons on the Trinity is in final revisions, and that the sermons for Corpus Christi are coming along and 'hoping to finish soon'.
  On another note.  I am nearing completion of a work on Meister Eckhart but not the usual sort of thing.  I have taken a stab at writing an historical fictional novel on Eckhart.  I recently recounted to a friend that the difference between the scholarly pieces on Eckhart  I have done and this fictional work has been telling.  In the academic writings I have limited my examination of the data to a critical reading.  Now, in the world of fiction, the same data has been approached not from the aspect of facts, though the facts remain.  Rather, it has been approaching these facts from the aspect of their narrative, the story they suggest.  Behind the facts are so many questions of why, or when or how that contain a story that longs to be told.  I hope that it will be available in Spring, 2011 and will post more information in the future.  The title will be: The Death of Magister Aycardus.
  I think that is the latest news and hope to post blogs more frequently now that the cold is curtailing my romps.